This countdown is of how many school days are left until the next break! It hardly seems possible that November is over with and done. I think it was just a blur for me pretty much the entire month. I am sitting here typing while glancing over at the evergrowing pile of things I should be taking care of but it is way more important to post on the blog. The sad thing is is that I am really upset that I don’t have my excuse of “I had classwork to do.” Not that I want more classwork but it did sound more legitimate than I just didn’t want to do it. Yikes…I am really going to have to do this. Why is it so many other things I can do just fine? The riding mulching mower works great. I got the yard completely clean and now know that I should rake out the flower beds into the yard THEN go over the yard. I almost wanted to just mow down my flowerbeds the other day when I realized I did this backwards. I can buy stuff just fine. I have even found a book that is helping me along the way and reaffirming my feelings and emotions. I can still do laundry and I still hate it. I can cook a turkey. I can’t sit down and concentrate on the bills. Maybe that is the key word…concentrate. I seem to have issues with that. If it is mindless, I can do it. If I have to think really hard…fa get about it! Oh well…my book says that this is normal. 14 more to go….I already need the break. Maybe the bills can wait until then!!!! What do ya think Jeffy????
November 30th, 2009 at 08:49pm
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The turkey was actually pretty good. I rubbed it down with vegetable oil and put fajita seasoning all over it. It came out golden brown and was really tender. After a late lunch, we then watched the Cowboys trounce over the Raiders. Then we went to Kristi’s house to meet the new member of the family. Brad’s nephew Heath is getting married in Las Vegas on Sat. So we went to approve of the new gal. She is cute and he is really in love…you can just tell. Brad had said he wanted to try to go to the wedding and I guess he is going to get to see it, maybe with the real Elvis standing beside him!
I have still avoided the bills. I just don’t want to play this game. I know my financial advisors don’ t want to hear that but I really don’t.
We have been dogsitting this week and this dog has turned out to be such a good boy. He is a golden retriever teenager-1 year old. He is taller than our 5 year old Golden Sadie. He is a little goofy cause of his long legs but he has adapted to life at our house quickly. He isn’t even worried about the cats anymore. He has learned to sit and just tonight figured out what we meant by shake. What a good boy!!!
Two more days off and then 3 weeks until Christmas break. I think we can make it. We did enjoy a day of sleeping in today. It was 11:30 before I got up and 12:30 for Katie!!! We are lazy bums!!!
November 27th, 2009 at 10:01pm
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This is the first major holiday we have spent without Bradley. Several have told me it would be hard. Of course, this morning at about 5 am I woke up and started crying. It was probably my first really good cry since he left us. I knew that all I was crying for was what used to be his earthly life. And that was even life before we knew cancer. So ultimately, I stopped crying because he is doing great. I pictured him sitting with his grandpas, grandmas and his mom and my dad, shelling pecans on this big wide porch with little humidity and no bugs and the perfect 70 degree beautiful day. Why should I cry for that? I am crying because I am sitting here calling the plummer because our new toilet that Brad thought we needed in March doesn’t have enough flush power to get the crud to the street sewer so it clogged up. I am crying because neither Katie or I know how to cook since Brad spoiled us all these years, so we were about to undertake our first turkey. I am crying because the yard is full of leaves again. I am crying because …I don’t know…So I stopped.
The turkey is in the oven despite Katie’s joy of exploring the giblet bag. The pipes were cleaned yesterday so we are good to go for awhile. And I am about to get on that riding, mulching mower and see what I can do about these leaves.
We will update later on if the turkey was a success. The dogs were quite intrigued by the vision of the girls trying to cook. I think they see a large turkey in their future. I told Katie, if the bird tastes bad then at least we have corn, mashed potatoes and rolls. We will be just fine.
November 26th, 2009 at 10:27am
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This weekend I finished up my grad class and all of the projects. That was a huge relief. It is so funny how your brain can’t really make sense of the written word during a time like this. I squeezed out what was in there to finish up and there wasn’t much left. I was able then to sleep like a baby come Sat. night and most of the day Sunday. I could not stay awake during the Cowboy game but I did manage to wake up with 2:17 left to go, so in reality I saw the whole game. It wasn’t pretty but it was a W!
After class, I went to lunch with some of the girls from class, then I went to do a little retail therapy. I went to Garden Ridge just to walk around mainly, bad time to go on Sat. afternoon but it was mentally relaxing. But then on the way back home I just happened to stop off at Grubb’s Nissan in Bedford. Well….guess what??? Yes. I did it…..I came home with a brick red…Tuscan Sun…to be exact….07 Maxima!!! It was so fun making the purchase. If you need a new or used car, go see the guys at Grubb’s. See Bill McKenzie or Wayne Rhew both of them are good guys and will take care of you. No, I didn’t get paid for that endorsement!!! I just owed Bill a mention since on the blog for March 14, 2007 he was mentioned but not by name!
This week starts the bill figuring out. Death certificates came in on Friday, so that enables me to get going on all the paperwork end. By the way, each death cert. costs $45 dollars and they recommend you get 7-10 of them. That is crazy! It takes a lot of money to leave this world. You guys need to be ready!
Katie and I have had over 1 million…well…maybe not that many… invites to Thanksgiving. We are starting to feel like just sitting here in our comfy sweats eating Boston Market sounds like a good plan. If you have invited and we don’t attend don’t be offended.
Sorry today is so random…I think this is my brain still on shut down mode. Anyway. I feel like Brad is still right here with me. I miss him and his cutting up and laughing but he is laughing his way in Heaven and how could I not wish that for him. Again…we will be ok. I know that now on this side of his death. Before I didn’t want to ponder this side too much but I think he would be proud of us.
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:35am
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Man…have I been busy. I guess that is a good thing but I am about to need a break! At least two are coming my way. Tomorrow is the last day of school for a week. I love Thanksgiving break. I really love that Irving sees to it that we keep that week long break. It is desperately needed by all. By Sat. at noon my graduate class is done with! That is a big AMEN! I was able to get all my papers and projects turned in last night. Tonight my project partner and I met for a couple of hours and hammered out the 45 minute presentation that we must do. Tomorrow night and Sat. morning are the last two class meeting times. Do you feel the exhaustion running off the page yet? I plan on sleeping straight from Sat. night through Monday, maybe Tues. I see that the blog is getting lots of hits everyday but I sort of feel like Brad did. When none of you make comments it is hard to get motivated to write. I have had a few other thousands of words I have been writing but I can see the light at end of the tunnel.
My kids at school have been great. They wanted me to tell them what happened and so I started to. Then pretty quick into it one of the kids said, “I know exactly how you feel. One time we had a cat that died.” That’s when I had to stop the conversation. It was funny really. I wanted to scream ”A cat and a husband are two totally different things ” but I didn’t. I just got us all back to work and told them I would have to continue later. Tonight we had a family night at school. One of my former students who is now in middle school came to find me, hugged me and then preceeded to tell me that he had put me on the prayer list at his church for me to find someone quickly and to be safe. I thought that was so sweet. Not sure about finding someone quickly. I teased with Brad all the time about he couldn’t leave me until I was hot. Meaning skinny! Well…he certainly didn’t hold up his end of the deal! Anyway, I asked the kid to put in this Sunday that I needed to figure out how to pay the bills.
Speaking of bills, the death certificates have taken what seems like forever to get here. I don’t want to sound crass but hurry up…this is holding up my entire process of finding the funds that have been left to live with! I can’t believe that you can find out you have cancer in 4 hours, get a late payment notice in 3 days, but it takes forever for them to type in a form that says you kicked the bucket! Surely there is an online form to fill out! I think if I was trying to get someone else’s identity I could have done it faster than this. Really!
Enough for now. Tomorrow is two weeks since the worst day of my life. I can’t believe it happened and many times I find myself thinking that I just left him in Houston to get well and I am supposed to go pick him up any day. Then reality hits and I do remember that my life has changed. I will be ok. I already know that now. But I do miss him terribly.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:40pm
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I am a little lost in all the confusion and turmoil that putting together a great party does to someone. Yes, that is right. I said a great party. Last night at 5:00, a ton of people who loved Brad got together to celebrate the life he lived while here on Earth. I am quite sure that the party he is having now is nothing to compare to our event last night, but this one down here was fabulous. There were around 396 signatures in the guest book. Not that we were counting and/or taking attendance. If you need a note of excuse it better be good. The best one was from a friend in Colorado who had a meeting with the governor and attorney general and they weren’t being very flexible with their time. I think that one might just win out over those of you who wanted to stay home and watch the CMA’s. Speaking of country music, I don’t know how in the world Brad has control now over radio stations but Katie and I were in the car just before the last visitation and Toby Keith’s new song, “Cryin for Me” came on and of course, the words were exactly written for Brad. So there were go…crying in the car.
It’s a little funny-this grieving widow thing. How do you practice for it? Do you expect that it could happen at any moment? I remember laying across Brad’s chest and wailing for him to wake up one more time on Friday morning to hear another voice behind my shoulder telling me this was a little too dramatic and Brad would get embarrassed if I made a scene. I stopped. I knew he wasn’t in there. It was simply the casing that I was accustomed to. Guess I have seen too many great movies where the hero makes a comeback at the last second. They told me I could stay as long as I wanted. As I sat there with my temperature rising in the gown and mask I had to dawn to see him for the last time, I asked my good friend, Kristi, how long was I supposed to do this? Does it make me a better person if I stay longer? Does it tell the nursing world that I cared more than the last grieving wife? I knew it wasn’t doing him or myself, much less Kristi any good to stay there too long. At that point, I just wanted to get on the road to Irving and love on my Katie. So we left…or tried to. We had loaded all of his belongings which fill up and overflowed a wheelchair. When we started looking for specific items, we realized that they didn’t pack a thing in his suitcase which was why it was overflowing the chair…hmmm…strange practice but we figured it out and condensed somewhat. Still we needed to use the wheelchair. Maybe for us to lean on as much as to carry the stuff out to the car for the last time. Back to the exit from ICU room 734. We were trying to leave and we couldn’t get the wheelchair out the sliding glass door. We kept backing up the chair and trying to line it up just right and then we realized the leg thing kept moving out to the side right as we hit the bump where the door would slide. That was what was keeping the chair from going out the door. Crazy as it sounds, Kristi and I were chuckling about how two supposedly intelligent 5th grade teachers couldn’t figure out how to drive a full wheelchair, when we realized it was just Brad saying goodbye. We both looked back at him, told him to stop it and the next time we tried, we got right out. Weird way to leave MDAnderson, lobby empty at 5:45 in the am. We had to have security escort us. Found out that was customary in most hospitals when the “loved” one comes to view the body. I guess they thought I might go postal on them or something. Eeriely quiet, a few security people-”SA-CUR-ATEE” (Nevermind…that’s a whole other story!), one lady who was like me several times and didn’t have a hotel room curled up on a really not comfy chair with a hospital blanket on and a few other nurses rushing in to punch the clock. The entry at MDA is like a grand hotel with a soaring ceiling, a grand piano usually being played by a volunteer and people from all over the world seeking answers and cures. Right in the middle there is a beautiful tall water fountain sculpture made with money donated by some family who’s name I looked at a million times but never even processed. That morning I looked at that name and wondered how they felt as they left the building for hopefully the very last time. Mixed emotions. Sad, happy it was complete, glad, mad, worried, scared, exhausted. These were my feelings at the time. At that moment, I knew that I wanted to have donations made to MDAnderson but directly to the doctor that is studying the hideous cancer monster that took my Brad. With Brad’s luck, the donation money paid by his friends would have gone toward the purchase of a Hiney Hider. That’s the name of the maker of those bathroom doors for those of you who haven’t spent much time in public bathrooms. If you missed the address it is on the post just before this one. I would love for Brad’s name to be included in a medical journal as funding a study which just happened to be the cure. How great would that be!! Also, on the last post read the poem by Alan called DUDE. It sums up what happened last night. If you don’t “get it” then my only response is that you shoulda been there!
Last night, this grieving widow (wow…still sounds totally foreign to me) learned that you better love on people while they are around you, make great friends who can actually think of nice, true things to say about you, and keep in touch with people no matter what sort of situation you find yourself in. Brad caused a bunch of different people to have to come to terms with situations they had found themselves in. I enjoyed watching each of these events play out. I knew Brad was TVOing it so he could replay each look, each piece of conversation had. He studied those plays like a coach and he made sure they happened.
If you could find your way back to the very first post-(I dont even know if it is still here, but Mark can probably find it! ) you would see something that Brad wrote about me crying that we didn’t have any friends as we embarked on this cancer journey. I don’t know what was wrong with me. How can you say a gym overflowing with people and hundreds of others that weren’t there counts as no friends. Silly me. What was I thinking! Enough for now. As always, I am exhausted but this sure feels good to write these thoughts down…almost as good as retail therapy Jeff!!!! t
November 12th, 2009 at 09:09pm
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This has been another great day. Brad has been laughing up a storm! The funeral director was a little taken back by our laughter but he got the idea when Brad’s sister spoke up and shared that Brad would have been cracking even more jokes!
Arrangements:
Visitation/Viewing- Tues Nov. 10, 2009 from 6-8pm
at
Donnelly’s Colonial Funeral Home
606 Airport Fwy. (Hwy 183)
Irving, TX 75062
South service road between MacArthur and O’Connor
2nd Visitation/Viewing- Wed. Nov. 11, 2009 from 12-3pm
Same funeral home
Celebration of Life-Memorial Service
Wed. November 11, 2009
5:00pm
Farine Elementary
615 Metker
Irving, TX 75062
(from funeral home-exit to service road, at light turn left, go through 2 stoplights, and the next left will be Metker, go past the church and daycare-school is on the right.)
November 7th, 2009 at 06:47pm
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Now you won’t have to guess if this is Tami or Brad writing. However, I might just throw in some misspelled words to throw you off now and again! About 24 hours ago from right now I lost my forever best friend, confidant, and love. Yesterday, I had about 1,000,000 conversations about Brad. Every single one of them was filled with laughter and joy. Brad was a great guy. I spent more of my life with him than before I met him. I have a huge hole in my path right now but with the love and support I have felt from everyone, that hole was passable yesterday and hopefully with time will be the same each day.
Brad used this blog as sort of a therapy for dealing with cancer. I now will use this blog as sort of a therpy for dealing with grief. Hopefully, it will touch hearts and bring laughter along the way making this new adventure easier for me, Katie and the millions of others in the world grieving.
Cancer sucks. That’s it. Nothing else to say on that topic.
MD Anderson. You gave Brad 2 1/2 more years of life with me and Katie. Some days were great, some not so great. We ALWAYS knew we were in the best hands. From day 1, we felt your love and care that permeated from your souls for those with the disease and those who were caretakers and supporters. I can’t thank you enough. I was glad to put my “Smart Chip” in the slot yesterday for the last time. You guys gotta work on that parking fee, seriously!
Family-As we have said, you guys have carried us through this battle. We love you all so much. Brad loved everyone of you and so do Katie and I. He would not wish this disease on anyone else in our circle. As for any of your current faults, Katie did tell me that three of you swept the living room floor yesterday at separate times. My floor is probably in shock. Feel free to sweep if that helps you through this time, but know that I don’t expect it and neither does my floor really!
Friends- Good grief! (What exactly does that mean? Am I experiencing that phrase for the first time?) Yesterday, we found out just how small our house is between people and food filling it up. Last year we “downsized” seriously when we bought this place. God put in place just what needed to be happening right when we needed it. You guys have been put into our lives for certain times right when we needed it. I don’t think I have laughed so much as I did yesterday. I was so blessed to know that Brad made everyone laugh. All in all, it was a really good day yesterday. Brad always said that if the worst thing that was going to happen with him is that one day he would wake up in the arms of Jesus then ok…he felt he was in a win/win situation. He worried mostly about me and Katie left on this side. We are going to need help. Be there for us. Just don’t think you all need to sweep! We love you guys.
Now, I fell asleep quickly tonight because I had only one hour of sleep before the “crisis of the end” phone calls started coming. I was exhausted. Then tonight, I woke up and reality smacked me in the face again. So I checked the blog and facebook. Wow…today’s form of grieving. Hmmmmm. I can beginning to feel tired again so I am going to try to sleep some more. Pray for Katie and I, and our family and friends during the next few days as many decisions will be made as to where, when and how we will celebrate Brad’s earthly life. I can promise you this- won’t be stuffy, won’t be sad, won’t be short either probaby! Oh…Brad would hate that I just said that- his attention span wouldn’t last a long celebration. But…I guess this time, he is -in a sense- a captive audience.
November 7th, 2009 at 02:49am
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It is with great sadness that I must share with you that our friend, Brad, has died.
Tami called a few minutes ago, so say that an infection in Brad’s lungs had lead to arterial bleeding that the doctors could not stop. They thought for a short time that they could get him into the ICU or the operating room in critical condition, but he didn’t make it.
Tami was calm but clearly in a state of shock. I prayed with her over the phone for God’s grace for she and Katie and the rest of the family over the next few days. She asked that I share this sad news and notify a few folks here in Evergreen where Brad, Tami and Katie lived for a few years.
Brad had complete confidence in the fact that when he did die that he would enter into God’s presence for all eternity. That confidence wasn’t based on some false hope that he had done enough good things or gone through just the right religious motions, but instead on his belief and trust in what God had done for him by sending Christ to die to pay the price for sin.
Even when things were not going well, when he was feeling sick as a dog, worried about getting off of the pain meds and half delusional from the ones he was on, Brad never lost faith in God’s deep love for him, Tami and Katie. He would understand our grief at his passing, but would also want us to remember that he wasn’t afraid of dying and, while not wanting to leave us behind, knew that, for him, the best was yet to come.
There is so much more to write and to share about my friend, Brad, but for now, please join me in praying for Tami and Katie. We’re far away, but I know those of you who are close will wrap them up in your love on our behalf.
We’ll post the details on services here as soon as they are available. If you’d like to leave a note of encouragement for Tami and Katie you can do that by posting a comment here.
Mark Carlson (Evergreen, CO)
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. I Peter 1:3-5 (ESV)
November 6th, 2009 at 06:21am
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I fell. Well I had just got into the restroom to untangle all of the tubes they tie around you and someone tried to open the door….I looked like a mini whirl wind as I went down to the ground with my shoulder hitting the bottom of the bowl
Forget being embarrassed. Eight nurses came in with 8 different ideas on how to get me up off of the floor. 20 minutes later, we finally had me and my new thong I didn’t know that I owned.
Needless to say, I probably won’t be coming home tomorrow. The have figured what is causing all of my probablems and they say it will just a few weeks to few months to get back to normal.
It never can be dull.
Brad
November 3rd, 2009 at 08:40pm
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